Several lawsuits allege the candidate played a role in car accidents
Snap is removing the controversial "speed filter" from Snapchat this week, NPR reports. The in-app effect displays your current speed in miles or kilometers per hour, and several critics have claimed the feature encouraged reckless driving - with some saying Snap should be held liable when the speed filter is connected to fatal car crashes.
There have been multiple lawsuits over the years linking Snapchat to car accidents. One related to a 2015 car accident arrived in Georgia just a few years after Snapchat first updated it to include the filter. In the years since, the company has downgraded the filter to a poster, burying it in a separate list, and making it a little more difficult to use.
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals recently ruled that Snap can be sued for the speeding candidate/poster's involvement in car accidents. The court found Snap is not protected here under Section 230 - the part of the Communications Decency Act that protects companies from being sued for content users post on the platform.
The case included, Lemmon v. Snap, another incident in Georgia that resulted in the deaths of three men in 2017. The Ninth Circuit Court said members of the men's family can sue Snap after the case was initially dismissed in 2020.
Snap confirmed that the poster is being removed and provided the following statement :
Nothing is more important than the safety of our Snapchat community, and we previously disabled the filter at driving speeds. Today, Snapchat users hardly ever use the sticker, and in light of this, we are removing it completely.
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